Lost Among the Living(3)
He died in the war, Dottie had said, but it was just another sting of hers. According to the official record, my husband had not died in the war. When there is a body, a grave, then a person has died. But no one ever tells you: When you have nothing but thin air, what happens then? Are you a widow, when there is nothing but a gaping hole in what used to be your life? Who are you, exactly? For three years I had been trapped in amber—first in my fear and uncertainty, and then in a slow, chilling exhale of eventual, inexorable grief.
As long as I was with Dottie, part of me was Alex’s wife. He still existed, even if only in the form of Dottie’s innuendoes and recriminations. Just hearing someone—anyone—say his name aloud was a balm I could not let go of. I had followed her across Europe for it, and now I would follow her to Wych Elm House, her family home. Where Alex had lived part of his childhood, something he had never thought to tell me.
I stared out to sea, uneasy, as England loomed on the horizon.
CHAPTER TWO
When she’d hired me, I had assumed Dottie’s trip to the Continent was a pleasure jaunt, the sort of thing rich middle-aged women did for no reason. By the time we arrived in Rome, I understood that my employer’s aim was entirely different: Though she was already richer than I could ever be, Dottie was in business to make money.
The war, Dottie explained to me as we sat in a train carriage and she inserted a cigarette into its holder, had created a great many ruined and cash-starved denizens of the upper class. The smart ones had invested in arms factories and army supplies when war broke out. The foolish ones, the ones who had sat on their ancient piles of property and waited for the old world to right itself, had lost, and Dottie meant to take advantage of it.
Her currency, her Great White Whale, was art. Paintings, sculptures, sketches, from shards of ancient Greek masterpieces to rolled-up canvases by the geniuses of the last century—all of it could be found on the Continent, owned by someone who was desperate for money. And money was something Dottie had. She offered them low prices for the contents of their galleries, paid in cash, and was slowly building a stockpile of art that would be priceless once the postwar depression lost its hold, as she believed it would.
“But you already have money,” I said that day in the train car. “You’re going to a lot of trouble.”
“Pay attention, Manders,” she said, gesturing for me to light a match for her cigarette. “Look around you at these people. Look at what’s become of them when I come to call. Rich old families—centuries old, some of them. My family is younger than theirs, and so is my money. The lesson is that we have money now, but we have no idea what will happen to us in ten years, or twenty.” She took a puff of the cigarette as I shook out the match. “I have no intention of letting anything of the sort happen to my son, or to his children. You can never have too much money. Perhaps that makes me avaricious; I suppose it does.” She took another drag and regarded me. “If my sister had had a little more avarice when she married and had Alex, you wouldn’t be in the situation you’re in now.”
Another of her stings, but it was true. I thought of her words now as I sat on a different train months later, this one traveling from London to Hertford. Alex’s mother had gone against her parents’ wishes and married an unsuitable man—she’d lived in a state of happiness and limited funds as her husband had begun to see success, until both had died unexpectedly when Alex was young, leaving him orphaned. The subsequent years had drained the little money they had left, and now it was gone.
I stared out the window of the third-class car, unseeing. I was back in England, just as I’d dreaded. I’d been given two days off, enough time to travel up to see Mother in Hertford, stay the night, and return to London, where Dottie was spending the time arranging for the delivery of her looted pieces and seeing them on to Wych Elm House.
Dottie must know all about Mother; I assumed it, though we had never spoken of it. She would make it a point to know everything about me. She could not possibly have approved of someone like me marrying into her precious family—someone who did not even know who her father was, whose mother was committed to a hospital for the insane. And yet, for all her poking and prying at me in her moods, she never threw those particular flaws in my face. She was strangely tolerant of the fact that my mother was incurably mad, that I needed days off to visit her in the hospital whose fees I paid from my salary. I asked no questions and took the reprieve of silence, since Mother was a topic I had no wish to dissect under Dottie’s blunt lens.
“She’s doing well today,” the nurse said to me as she led me to the visiting room. “We’re being ordered around like a set of ladies’ maids.” She gave me a smile.
I smiled politely back. So it was to be Mother’s Lady of the Manor mood, as I called it. I’d seen it many times. It was puzzling and sometimes irritating, but at least it was one of her calmer phases.
Mother sat in a wicker chair in the visiting room, staring out the window at the garden. She wore a gingham dress and soft slippers, her long hair tied in a loose braid down her back. She’d been given a robe, presumably because she’d complained of cold at some now-forgotten moment, and she’d left it crumpled on the floor at her feet. She was forty-six by my last count, but her skin looked younger, and her slumped shoulders and her narrow, fidgeting hands looked older. She turned her large brown eyes to me as I came in the room.